11.19.2013

On the Supposed Unsuitability of Fairytales for Adults

My
dear Lucy,

I
wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that
girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old
for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be
older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading
fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf,
dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too
deaf to hear, and too old to understand a word you say, but I shall
still be

your
affectionate Godfather,

C.S.
Lewis

–
Dedication
of The
Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe

Some
time ago I wrote an open letter on
the supposed unsuitability of fairytales for children,
criticizing the notion that children should be sheltered from
fairytales. Another view, even more prevalent, is that fairytales are
an exclusively children's literature, the rightful domain of
saccharine animated films and kindergarten story-time.

These
two views – that fairytales are unsuitable for children, and that
they are only
suitable for children – are less at odds than you might think.
Because they are united by a common failure to recognize the real
value of fairytales, adherents of either group are likelier to join
forces to ban fairytales altogether, given the opportunity, than they
are to haggle about age-appropriate demographics.

According
to one view, exposing children to fairytales is likely to scar them
psychologically and impede or warp their development. According to
the other, adults who read fairytales for personal enjoyment are odd,
abnormal, coping with adulthood by clinging to comforting fixtures of
their childhood – something like adult thumb-suckers. In both
views, fairytales are things which have to be “got over” or
“outgrown.”

But
I am deeply convinced that we have not outgrown, and shall never
outgrow, Faerie.

This
may be an unpopular view, particularly with the sophisticates
and intelligentsia
among us; but no group of minds is more enslaved to intellectual fads
than such self-important neo-aristocracies.

Lewis'
Narnian dedication correctly infers that the season of life in which
we are “too old for fairy tales” is specious rather than mature.
The attitude occurs during that age in which we begin wanting to be
“taken seriously” by others and feel that, to attain this goal,
we must zealously safeguard our fledgling adulthood.

Being
“too old for fairy tales” is an adolescent attitude. As a claim
to literary maturity, it is analogous to acting macho (a claim to
strength of body, mind, and character), or to adopting an air of
worldly-wisdom and superiority (a claim to understand matters
inexpressible to those of lesser experience).

Just
as acting macho is proof of our weakness – just as acting ineffably
wise is proof of our inability to explain experiences we ourselves do
not yet understand – so, too, is dismissal of “childish”
fairytales proof that we are not yet ready for them.

It
is possible that the only fairytales we have encountered are those
revised
to be “more suitable for children,”
stories which have had all their depth, layers, and morals stripped
from them. In these circumstances the attitude is understandable,
innocent... perhaps even inevitable. To discover and benefit from the
merits of folklore, sometimes it is not our pretensions to adulthood
we must overcome, but rather the
poverties of our childhood.

Nor
is this challenge solely faced by individuals. From time to time
whole societies experience hubristic fits of scientific or religious
“enlightenment,” during which people come to believe that they
can safely ignore, scorn, and abandon “simple” folk wisdom –
only to discover on down the road that they really ought to have
spent a few minutes sitting at the feet of the old woman or the
uneducated man. It turns out they knew something valuable about life
after all.

If
we substitute the more accurate term folklore
for fairytale,
we immediately start to grasp, through sheer intuition, what is
worthwhile about this canon of world literature:

Folklore
transmits to us an entire heritage of “common” sense and
everyday wisdom in memorable, highly-imaginative parables

Folklore
unites us with our earliest human ancestors and our most distant kin
– our neighbors furthest-removed in both time and space

Folklore
convinces us that we are not isolated in our struggle against the
human condition, except by choice

Folklore
reminds us that we can
choose a better course – for ourselves, for our loved ones, for
our world and its people, and for the children whose inheritance we
steward during our lives

But
because folklore
is an academic term, we simultaneously introduce a new misconception.
“Ah, well, folklore,
of course. Naturally there's merit to academic
study of folk literature. But no well-adjusted person past the age of
ten reads fairytales for fun.”

This
attitude is a Modernist fad. Thanks to the rise of the middle class
during the Victorian era, and a corresponding upper-class obsession
with fairies and idealization of Childhood, children's versions of
folk-stories began to be produced. Up to and through the Victorian
era, folk-stories were all-ages entertainment. It was only afterward
that fairytales became “old-fashioned,” then “anti-modern,”
then “un-scientific,” then “escapist” and “anti-progressive.”

Partly,
this was because whether or not fairies actually existed (in a
taxonomic sense) was still a raging debate (Terri Windling points out
that fairy abductions, for example, were commonly reported in
newspapers until well into the twentieth century, when reports of
alien abductions replaced them). Modernists wanted us to “face the
facts”: science is unable to confirm that fairies exist. Ergo,
we should assume they don't. Ergo,
literature which roundaboutly claims or assumes the existence of
fairies is false. False stories are lies. Lies are harmful. Ergo,
fairytales are harmful.(Funny, isn't it, that we don't take the same reductionist attitude towards the aliens!)

Thus,
in certain circles of culture and with a varying rate of infection,
opinions about folklore
were reduced to “stories which falsely and harmfully claim that
fairies are concretely real.” Belief in fairies became the province
of the uneducated or willfully ignorant.

As
so often happens in such cases, society happily traded wisdom
for knowledge.
Everyman Jack traded the “magic” beans inherited from his fairy
godmother for an ordinary cow – and never met a giant or made a
fortune all the days of his life. The dishonest miller's daughter
refused Rumpelstiltskin’s offer of assistance on the grounds that
it was scientifically impossible for him to hold up his end of the
bargain – and starved to death in the king's dungeon. Dismissing
his father Edward as a pathological liar, Will Bloom resolved he
would never listen to another Big
Fish
story his crazy old man told. Eventually, their estrangement poisoned
Will's relationship with his own kids.

When
we ignore fairytales, we find ourselves living inside them: not as
heroes, but as byword-characters – chumps whose arrogant misdeeds
serve as warnings to those who come after us.

Have
you ever wondered why the protagonist of so many folktales is the
youngest of three siblings?

It's
so the storyteller can highlight the mistakes and consequences
experienced by the first two. In folk-stories, as in life, sometimes
there is no margin for error.

Once
again I must appropriate Neil Gaiman's paraphrase of G.K. Chesterton:
reassured by the factual knowledge that dragons do not exist, we
disregarded the far more important point, that dragons can be slain.
And we paid no attention when the storyteller told us how.
If we had, we might have realized that the instructions for
dragon-slaying were not, in fact, about slaying dragons; or at least,
that they were not only applicable to dragon-slaying.

Fortunately
for us – and for the older siblings of those three-sibling tales –
some folklorists argue that the three siblings symbolize three
versions of the same person. The version who succeeds – typically
the only character actually named in the story – is the one who has
learned from past mistakes and carries the memory of those lessons
forward into the next leg of the journey.

Are
you following me?

Or
are you caught up in an inability to suspend your disbelief about an
older brother getting turned into a bleeding oak tree because he was
rude to an elderly woman by the wayside? Because that's not what
matters here.

To
become the hero of the story, folklore teaches us that we must
acknowledge and learn from our mistakes. We will
be changed by them. Whether we are changed for the better or for the
worse – whether we go on naively repeating them – is up to us.

We
can cling stubbornly to the same ideas about adulthood we formed in
our adolescence, and be warped by them. We can decide that we've
“arrived”, that our character is complete, and stagnate until we
rot.

Or
we can keep questioning the meaning of success, humbly listening to
and learning from others, so that we can keep refining and pursuing
our dreams – so that we can keep growing.

A
friend of mine, a musician and professional counselor, once remarked
that he's seen many, many people get old – but he hasn't seen many
grow up.

There's
a reason we've always told one another these stories, some with
motifs from the dawn of humanity. It isn't dumb luck that has allowed
them to survive all the societies, all the centuries, and all the
fads that have been. Fairytale wisdom is subtle enough to elude
adults, yet palatable enough to delight children. Only someone
anxious to forget the child he has been, yet insecure about the adult
he is becoming, could scorn that kind of story.

I
fervently hope such a person will be old enough to read them again
soon.